Pages

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Scene on Three (9): The House of Mirth

I can’t
explain why this long passage from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth has caught my attention, without spoiling the whole
plot (for those who have not read it). It’s lovely, so vivid, and memorable, and Wharton captured the moment in
a beautiful narration, I almost recognized some Zola-ish style here… I have not
finished the book yet, but I believe I will remember this scene forever,
whatever the end would be.

“Selden had
given her his arm without speaking. She took it in silence, and they moved
away, not toward the supper room, but against the tide which was setting
thither. The faces about her flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she
hardly noticed where Selden has leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in the fragrant
hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their feet, and about them was the
transparent dimness of a mid-summer night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns
in the depth of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among
lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash of the
water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been blown
across a sleeping lake.

Selden and
Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own
dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze
on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch
of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the
sweetness of being alone in it together. At length Lily withdrew her hand, and
moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the
dusk of the branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they
seated themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

Suddenly she
raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child. "You never
speak to me — you think hard things of me," she murmured. "I think of
you at any rate, God knows!" he said.

"Then
why do we never see each other? Why can't we be friends? You promised once to
help me," she continued in the same tone, as though the words were drawn
from her unwillingly.

"The
only way I can help you is by loving you," Selden said in a low voice.

She made no
reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower. His own met
it slowly, and their lips touched.”

*Scene on
Three is Bzee’s meme of posting your captured scenes or passages, and
explaining why they are interesting. The ‘three’ means that we should post them
on the dates with ‘3’ in it: the 3rd, 13th, 23rd,
30th, or 31st.